by David Lynch
Badalamenti’s contribution to Blue Velvet didn’t end there. “David wanted to use a piece by Shostakovich which he couldn’t afford,” said Badalamenti, “and he asked me, ‘Can you write like Shostakovich?’ I told him I can’t compare myself to him, but I can give you that Russian sound.” Lynch realized he had a gold mine in Badalamenti, whose knowledge of music is vast and wide.
By the time the shooting of Blue Velvet wrapped in November 1985 the editing of the film was already well under way. Lynch is an intuitive but not impulsive filmmaker, and Caruso said, “David didn’t shoot a lot of film because he knew what the scene should be, what the camera angle should be, what the lenses were going to be, and he knew when he’d gotten what he needed and moved on.” Efficient though Lynch is, the original cut of Blue Velvet ran for three hours and fifty-seven minutes. “It worked at that length, too,” said Dunham, “and when I screened it for David he said, ‘It’s great, but I have one problem: We need to cut the length in half.’ We had to lose entire sequences from the film, and a lot changed from the first to the final cut.”
Elmes feels that the material that was lost was ultimately unnecessary. “There are scenes we photographed that aren’t in the film, but when I saw the cut David made, I realized they didn’t really add anything. He had the thread of the film so clearly up there on the screen. It’s as if all the footage we shot had been distilled, and I was completely blown away by it.”
Lynch and Badalamenti then traveled to Prague to record the score for the film. “The country was still under communist control then, and it was winter when we arrived,” Badalamenti remembered. “The people on the street, the musicians, the house engineers—everyone you met was afraid to speak, and there wasn’t a smile on anyone’s face. It was so strange. Our hotel rooms were bugged, we were videotaped in the dining room, and there were men in black coats trailing us. We’d walk on icy streets to the studio, and there would be garbage cans in the doorway, then we’d enter a dark hallway with low, flickering lights and climb a long staircase into an even darker studio room. The mood of the people, the buildings, and the deep quiet were the perfect environment to record music for Blue Velvet, and David loved it.
“While we were there David said, ‘Angelo, I want you to make me some tracks that we’ll call firewood that I can use to create sound design. Get some low instruments, like the cello and basses, and record some long, slow passages of music,’ ” Badalamenti continued. “I wrote out ten minutes of whole notes and let them sustain to a really slow click track and interspersed it with some scratchiness on the bows. When David worked with these slow recordings he’d play them at half speed, sometimes quarter speed. He puts this firewood underneath things, and we’ve done this a lot.”
After the film wrapped, Lynch got an apartment in Berkeley, where post-production was done. “That was a tense time,” recalled Fisk, “and I gave him a lump of coal in a leather traveling bag for Christmas. At that point we were trying to keep it together and David spent Christmas with me, and New Year’s Eve with Isabella. We were open about what was going on, and I told David we could stay married and he could be free to live as he wanted—maybe we can get through this. I tried to live with the situation, but I couldn’t. My heart was truly broken, and I was walking around like a lost person with blood dripping from every pore. I’d lost my best friend.
“We always remained in communication, though,” she added. “I’d grown up without my father, and I wasn’t going to deny my son his relationship with his father. I set up a separate phone in the house so David and Austin could always reach each other, and they talked every day. David was right there—he never abandoned us and he took care of us. I had a strange and restrictive upbringing and I owe David a lot because he taught me so much about life. He’s such a good guy and I’m eternally grateful to him.”
Lynch’s personal life was in disarray by the time the film was screened for the first time at De Laurentiis’s headquarters on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. That first screening was a bit rocky, too. “A handful of people were there,” recalled Caruso. “Dino, Fred Sidewater, who was Dino’s right-hand man, David, and a few others. So we play the movie, it finishes, the lights come on, and there’s silence. Everybody is looking at each other, and finally Dino says, ‘Nobody’s gonna want to distribute this picture, so I’m gonna form my own distribution company and distribute it myself.’ Dino paid for distribution, prints, and ads.”
The film was then taken on the road for a few preview screenings. “I remember going to a preview in the San Fernando Valley, and it was the worst preview I’ve ever been to,” said Rick Nicita. “The rawness of the characters, what Isabella goes through—it just seemed like a bad dream, and there weren’t just walk-outs, there were run-outs! In my memory people were running up the aisles! The next day David, myself, Raffaella, Dino, and a few other people were sitting in Dino’s office going over the cards, and it was gloomy. The comments were along the lines of ‘Kill the director. Who did this? Terrible!’ So we’re reading these cards and Dino looks around and says, ‘Fuck ’em. They’re wrong. This is a brilliant movie, we’re not gonna cut a single frame, and we’re gonna release it exactly as it is. The critics will love it, and the audience will be there.’ Dino was a fabulous guy.”
De Laurentiis was right, of course, but it took a while for Blue Velvet to find its audience. When the film screened in early September at the 1986 Telluride Film Festival—where the hippest film audiences in the country can be found—Laura Dern attended the screening with Lynch and MacLachlan, and she recalled, “People didn’t know whether they were supposed to laugh or run from their seats. Audiences now are quick to find unusual things hilarious or delicious, but David’s bravery when it comes to tone is like nothing we’d seen before that. Before David, nobody made it sad and funny at the same time, or terrifying yet hilarious, or sexual but odd, and Blue Velvet is all of those things. With the opening of the film you’re immediately thrust into a world where everything feels real but unreal, everything’s perfect but you can’t trust it, and then you descend into the underbelly. The intro is just mind-blowing, and the audience at that screening wasn’t ready for it.”
The film had officially premiered in competition at the Montreal World Film Festival in August of 1986, and it opened commercially in the United States on September 19th, 1986, in ninety-eight theaters across the country. Although many viewers found the film intolerably disturbing, Blue Velvet netted Lynch a best director nomination in that year’s Academy Awards, resurrected Dennis Hopper’s career, and went on to become a staple of film school curricula around the world.
It caused quite a stir when it came out, too. “I didn’t know the film was going to be so controversial,” said Rossellini. “The controversy was pretty rough and I think I bore the brunt of it. If people liked the film, David was given credit—and of course he deserved it. The film is above all else David’s expression. But if they didn’t like it they often said things about me being a model and Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, and being bent on destroying my image by playing this character, that I was rebelling against myself, and so forth. There was a lot of projection that was pure fantasy.”
Film critic Roger Ebert was particularly incensed by the film. Accusing Lynch of misogyny, Ebert asserted that Rossellini was “degraded, slapped around, humiliated, and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.” Ebert’s critique hasn’t aged quite as well as that of Pauline Kael, the high priestess of film criticism, then in residence at The New Yorker. Describing Lynch as a “populist surrealist,” and lauding MacLachlan’s performance as “phenomenal,” she summarized Blue Velvet as an inquiry into “the mystery and madness hidden in the ‘normal,’ ” and commented that “Lynch’s use of irrational material works the way it’s supposed to: we read his images at some not fully conscious level
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Caruso recalled, “We were surprised when the film was such a sensation. We didn’t think it was going to be a disaster, but we didn’t think it would be a movie people talked about for decades. Most critics loved it when it came out, though, and I think critics who wrote negative reviews didn’t understand what they were seeing. Blue Velvet is a movie you have to see a few times to get all the nuance and detail.”
“Blue Velvet might be David’s greatest film,” said Jack Fisk. “He came off of Dune, which was a horrible experience for him, and as a kind of consolation prize Dino said, ‘You can make the picture you want to make.’ He had these things pent up in him that he wanted to express, and Blue Velvet was an unleashing of all this stuff he’d had to hold back.”
Decades after the film was released, MacLachlan hosted a screening of Blue Velvet for a charity event and recalled, “I hadn’t seen it probably since it came out and didn’t know what to expect, and I really got caught up in the story. I think it’s a perfect film.”
I WAS SICK, JUST sick and devastated after Dune. Meditation has saved me a lot of times and that was one of them. It was a dark time. It helped that I had other scripts and I was thinking about what was next, but I couldn’t not think about all the time I’d just spent on that film. When you don’t have the freedom to do what you want and it goes bad, you feel like you’ve sold out and you deserve what you get, and I sold out right from the beginning. I knew the way Dino was, I knew I didn’t have final cut, and I had to adjust all along the way—it was a horrible thing.
I learned about failure, and in a way failure is a beautiful thing because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up, and it’s a freedom. You can’t lose more, but you can gain. You’re down and everybody knows you’re down and that you fucked up and you’re a loser, and you just say, “Okay,” and you keep working.
I get ideas and a lot of times I don’t know what they are or how they fit, but I write them down and one thing leads to another, so in a way I don’t really do anything. I just stay true to the idea. I probably wrote four drafts of Blue Velvet. They weren’t totally different, but I was finding my way, and I gave Kyle an unfinished draft of the script when we were shooting Dune.
I didn’t like the song “Blue Velvet” when it came out. It’s not rock ’n’ roll, and it came out during the birth of rock ’n’ roll and that’s where the power was. “Blue Velvet” was schmaltzy and didn’t do a thing for me. Then I heard it one night and it married with green lawns at night and a woman’s red lips seen through a car window—there was some kind of bright light hitting this white face and these red lips. Those two things, and also the words “and I still can see blue velvet through my tears.” These things got me going and it all married together.
If a character comes along and you’re the only writer around, they kind of introduce themselves to you and then you know them. Then they start talking and you go deeper in, and there’s stuff that’s surprising because everybody is a mix of good and evil. Almost everybody has a bunch of stuff swimming in them, and I don’t think most people are aware of the dark parts of themselves. People trick themselves and we all think we’re pretty much okay and that others are at fault. But people have desires. Like Maharishi says, built into the human being is always wanting more, and that desire leads you back home. Everybody finds their way eventually.
An important piece of the Blue Velvet script came to me in a dream, but I didn’t remember the dream until quite a while after I woke up from it. So, imagine me for some reason going over to Universal Studios the day after I had a dream that I didn’t remember. I went there to meet a man and went into the secretary’s room and the man was in the room behind her. In this secretary’s room there was either a couch or a chair near her desk, and because the man wasn’t ready to see me I went and sat down on this chair and waited. Sitting on that chair I remembered my dream, and I asked the secretary for a piece of paper and a pencil, and I wrote down these two things from the dream: a police radio and a gun. That did it for me. I always say I don’t go by nighttime dreams because it’s daydreaming that I like. I love the logic of dreams, though. Anything can happen and it makes sense.
So Richard Roth and I went and pitched this Blue Velvet idea to a friend of his who worked at Warner Bros. I’m telling this guy about finding an ear in a field and a few other things about the story, and he turns to Richard and says, “Is he making this stuff up?” I went ahead and wrote two drafts of the script and showed this gentleman at Warner Bros. the second draft and he hated it. He said it was horrible.
I had a lawyer who didn’t tell me that pitching Blue Velvet to this guy at Warner Bros. put the thing into turnaround and that if I wanted it back I had to do something about it. I don’t know what happened exactly—this is a horror story to me. I went off to Mexico and made Dune, and during that time I thought I had the scripts for Blue Velvet and Ronnie Rocket and that they belonged to me. When the dust settled after Dune, I sat down with Dino and Rick Nicita, and somehow it came out that Warner Bros. owned the script for Blue Velvet. I just about died. So Dino picked up the phone and called the head of the studio—and the story was that Lucy Fisher was running down the hall to tell him not to sell the script, but Dino got it from them and that was that. I guess you could say he gave it back to me, because he made it possible for me to make the film and gave me final cut, but that’s how Dino ended up with the script. Richard Roth was attached to the film up to a certain point, but eventually he decided it was best to let Dino run the show. But Richard’s listed as executive producer of the film and he made his contribution. It was Richard who came up with the name the Slow Club, which is where Dorothy Vallens sings.
Fred Caruso was the producer on Blue Velvet, and I love Fred, bless his heart. There are some people that talk in a way that gives you a feeling of assurance and safety, and Fred had that. He was very calm, very Italian. He just had a way about him and he could always talk me down. Fred often said to me, “I don’t know what you’re doing,” but he was really a good producer.
We went to Wilmington and Dino was making thirteen films at the studio and we were the lowest on the totem pole, but we had the greatest time. We were the poorest film on the lot, but Blue Velvet was like going from hell to heaven, because I had tremendous freedom. I didn’t really give up anything when the budget had to be reduced, either, because I could work around things. There weren’t so many rules in those days, and now there are many more rules, and it’s harder and harder to keep the money down. It forces you to either give up something or blow your brains out.
We all had a blast and became really close. We were away in a place, and we’d all have dinner together, we’d see each other every day, and everybody was there for a long period of time, and that doesn’t happen anymore. People come in quick now, then they go away, and you don’t have dinners. I don’t know what’s changed. Now it’s like tremendous pressure. Tremendous. And it just kills me, I can’t tell you. Shoots have to go faster. Blue Velvet started in May and went until Thanksgiving, and the days of long shoots like that are over.
I remember Dino came to dailies the first day of the shoot and we’d done a day of Steadicam up and down the staircase to Dorothy’s apartment, and when we got it back from the lab Fred realized the lens in the camera he’d used was broken and it was so dark that you almost couldn’t see anything. Dino sees that and he starts screaming, and I said, “Dino, calm down; the lens was broken, and we’ve just gotta reshoot it.”
Kyle played Jeffrey Beaumont because Kyle is an innocent, and he’s kind of all-American in a way that makes you think about the Hardy Boys. Jeffrey is curious and he’s a detective—well, everybody’s a detective—but he’s got that going on, and he likes women, and he likes a mystery. I looked at a lot of people before I found Laura Dern, and she’s perfect for Sandy. Sandy is smart and she has this playful nature. She’s a good girl, but that mind…she’s got a dreamy thin
g swimming in there, and a curious thing. She’s the daughter of a detective. Laura embodied this person that Jeffrey could be pals with at first then fall in love with, and they didn’t have a dark love. They had a pure love.
Dennis Hopper is a great actor, and I really liked him in Giant and Rebel Without a Cause and The American Friend. I was told not to hire Dennis. They said, “No, you cannot do that—he’ll get fucked up and you’ll never get what you want,” but I always wanted Dennis and I knew he was the perfect Frank Booth. I talked to a few other actors about the part, then somewhere in there his agent called and said Dennis was clean and sober and had just shot another picture, and that that director loved working with him and would be happy to talk to me. Then Dennis called and said, “I have to play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth,” and I said that’s good news and bad news. I had no reservations about hiring him.
To me, Dennis is about the coolest there is. He’s the rebel dream guy, and he has romance and tough guy rolled all into one, and it’s just perfect. And it’s a fifties thing, born out of the fifties. There’s a scene with Dennis watching Dorothy sing and Dennis cries in that scene and that was totally perfect. That’s a side of this romantic fifties rebel thing, where a guy could cry and it was totally okay and cool and then beat the shit out of somebody in the next minute. Macho guys don’t cry now, and it’s false, really, but the fifties had this poetry swimming through them.
When Dennis has his first scene as Frank Booth with Dorothy I was laughing uncontrollably, partly because I was so happy. The intensity, the obsession, the drivenness of Frank—and that’s the way it was supposed to be. When people get that obsessed there’s humor in it to me, and I loved it. He just nailed it. Dennis was Frank from the first second all the way through.
